Sometimes I get stuck. I’m a thinker and frequently over think, over analyze, etc. I call this getting in my own way. It’s also an aspect of the twin demons I’ve talked about in the past. Perfectionism and Procrastination can bring the best of intentions to an abrupt halt. I found a way out of that mess this week in several places. The first one was actually a sermon titled, Direction Without Doubt by Dr. Charles Stanley and you can listen to it here if interested. The second one was here at The Creative Penn where Joanna Penn is talking about, How To Write More And Create A Daily Writing Habit.
What I loved and gave me great encouragement was thinking about how much work I wanted to complete this year before I watched that big ball in New York city bring in 2014. Time goes so fast and I don’t want to waste it. I decided to shoot for 100,00 words. That’s an 80,000 word novel and either two short stories or possibly a novella. When I divided 100,000 words by the number of days left in the year, 318, I got 314.4 words a day that I had to write. That’s only a bit more than one page. ONE PAGE! Well I know I can do better without overwhelming myself. So I doubled it. That’s 628.9 words a day and that equals (drum roll) 200,000 WORDS!
I work full time and have multiple family responsibilities and still I know I can do this if I don’t procrastinate. That means not worrying about being perfect, no one is so why try. But do the best I can do and even if I only end up with 150,000 words that’s amazing.
So don’t count yourself out in making some awesome word counts this year. You know some days are better than others and even with a crisis or two we should be able to write a book a year. And once that habit is formed there is no holding you back.
And speaking of habits. You can use a calendar to track your progress or you can use whatever encourages you. I like Habit Forge. Maybe you will too. If you think this post was helpful please tweet it or Facebook it and spread the word.
All comments are welcomed and encouraged.
Have an awesome week.
I need to get that through my thick skull! I have shrugged off the manuscript for the blog, the marketing, the networking, etc. It’s the work on the stories that makes my heart content, but I seem to tell myself unless I can pound out a big chunk, there is no sense opening the file. I’m going to check out that calendar and try to change my point of view! (And maybe it could be applied to my house as well?)
And I will happily give it a tweet!
Hi Elizabeth!
Thanks for the tweet. I missed my word count yesterday. That means I didn’t work on the manuscript at all because of other things I had to write. But I’m hopeful today that I can get two pages completed. Come on and join me. We’ll compare notes later. It’s so much better than making ourselves crazy for not writing thousands of words. We will be the turtles passing the hare. 🙂 Surprise! :)Go turtles, go!
Have a great week, Elizabeth,
Jill
One of my writing buddies, Mike Dellosso has a post up about why it’s important not to overwhelm ourselves by taking on too much in this writing life. Check it out when you have time.
http://mikedellosso.com/2013/02/20/making-my-way-back/
Hi Jill,
I really liked this post. I checked out Joanna Penn’s post and her video was inspiring.
Now I need to apply myself. I have the same issues of perfectionism and procrastination
that you mentioned. Thank you for sharing. You’ve helped inspire me to plod on. 🙂
HI Kathy,
Anything we can do to inspire each other sounds good to me. 🙂 It’s a challenging dilemma but doable. Remember that old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed . . .